Local Elections

Funding for a pair of San Fernando Valley projects to house the homeless was approved by the Los Angeles City Council Friday as part of the first batch of money awarded under Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure passed by voters in November.

LOS ANGELES >> A Southern California legislator backed by the Democratic establishment and supporters of Bernie Sanders won an open U.S. House seat Tuesday. State Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez on Tuesday defeated rival Robert Lee Ahn to claim the seat in the 34th Congressional District, which runs through downtown Los Angeles.

Councilwoman-elect Monica Rodriguez will get an early taste of what it will be like to lead Council District 7 in the northeast San Fernando Valley. The 43-year-old former Public Works commissioner was appointed Tuesday as caretaker of the district more than three weeks before she is set to represent the area on the City Council on July 1, when her official term begins.

Monica Rodriguez has been certified the winner of the City Council race in the northeast San Fernando council race. Rodriguez pulled in 53.63 percent, or 9,588 votes, coming out ahead of her opponent Karo Torossian’s 46.

Council President Herb Wesson is expected to wait until after election results are certified before taking steps to appoint a caretaker for a northeast San Fernando Valley district that has been vacant since September, a council aide said Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES >> The president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education conceded defeat Tuesday night in his re-election bid as he fell far behind a challenger backed by well-heeled supporters of charter school expansion in the nation’s second-largest school district.

LOS ANGELES — A pair of candidates heavily backed by charter-school proponents are ahead in the vote count for the Los Angeles Unified School District board, potentially signaling a major policy shift in the nation’s second-largest school district.

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles police officers facing disciplinary hearings will have a choice of appearing before an all-civilian review board or a panel that includes two command-level officers, thanks to voters’ approval of a ballot measure condemned by critics as a weakening of the LAPD’s disciplinary system.

The runoff election to decide the fate of Los Angeles City Council and LAUSD board seats will not be official until nearly 40,000 outstanding ballots are counted through next month, city election officials said Wednesday.

Monica Rodriguez was already fitting in with her future colleagues during a visit Wednesday to the City Council chambers, just hours after emerging victorious in a runoff for a vacant northeast San Fernando Valley seat.

Fewer than one in 10 registered voters in Los Angeles cast their ballots this week to decide the outcome of fiercely contested city and school board races, election officials reported Wednesday. The combined voter turnout Tuesday across Los Angeles was 8.

Los Angeles Planning Director Karo Torossian has not conceded the unofficial winner of the Council District 7 race in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Torossian is down 833 votes, but 3,000 to 3,500 ballots in the district remain to be counted, according to campaign manager Eric Hacopian.

Big changes are coming for the second-largest school district in the nation, said its outgoing school board president, a day after his crushing defeat in an election that could have a huge effect on charter schools in the region.

It was a steady and slow morning in the north San Fernando Valley, where voters were heading to the polls to elect a representative to the Los Angeles City Council after months without one. Turnout wasn’t hitting presidential election-level numbers, but it was clear Tuesday that those who did vote were tuned in and eager to tap a leader who would represent a diverse area from Pacoima to North Hills.

Former public works commissioner Monica Rodriguez looks set to join one other woman on the Los Angeles City Council, after clinching a strong lead over planning director Karo Torossian in a runoff for the Council District 7 seat in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Cedillo appeared to be holding onto his seat with a commanding lead over bicycle activist Joe Bray-Ali in the Council District 1 race Tuesday night. With more than 65 percent of precincts reporting, Cedillo had double the votes of Bray-Ali.

LOS ANGELES >> Los Angeles voters Tuesday night were approving the creation of an all-civilian review board for police disciplinary hearings as an alternative to the traditional panel, which consists of two command-level officers and one civilian.

Nick Melvoin grabbed a strong early lead Tuesday over incumbent Steve Zimmer in the runoff for the Westside seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District board, an election serving as a referendum on charter schools.

Seventh grade teacher Kelly Gonez was leading in early election results Tuesday night, narrowly surpassing rival Imelda Padilla to represent District 6 on the Los Angeles Unified School District board.

After months of campaigning, two seats are up for grabs Tuesday for the Los Angeles Unified School District board – and both will affect public schools in the San Fernando Valley. In the eastern San Fernando Valley, a seventh-grade science teacher will face off with a community organizer to represent a vast area, from Van Nuys on the south to Sylmar on the north.

High-speed rail and bike lanes are just two of the many issues awaiting the attention of whoever voters elect in today’s runoff to represent a cluster of northeast San Fernando Valley communities on the Los Angeles City Council.

While her high school friends were thinking of leaving for greener pastures after graduation, Los Angeles City Council candidate Monica Rodriguez bought a home in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Rodriguez settled down in that house in Mission Hills in 1997, not long after graduating from Occidental College.

Karo Torossian, a longtime planning director for a San Fernando Valley area councilman, is accustomed to getting into the weeds on policy matters. But on a recent Sunday morning, he was tramping through actual weeds, brushing past wild, prickly overgrowth as he lugged a huge tire, a nearly fossilized tennis ball and other junk of mysterious origin from a bluff overlooking the Big Tujunga Wash and into a dumpster.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Monica Rodriguez and Karo Torossian both say they are ready to represent Los Angeles’ City Council District 7. It’s a sprawling, diverse area of the San Fernando Valley, where the challenges of working-class neighborhoods like Pacoima contrast with the issues faced by nearby Sunland-Tujunga.

PALMDALE >> Attorney Bryan Caforio on Saturday announced his candidacy for Congress in the 25th District, seeking a rematch against Rep. Steve Knight in November 2018. “I am running for Congress to give the people in this district a voice, to harness the unprecedented level of energy we have been witnessing, and to move this community in a direction that aligns with our values -- not Donald Trump’s values,” Caforio said at Laborers’ Local 300 headquarters in Palmdale.

As Tuesday’s runoff election nears, northeast San Fernando Valley residents are demanding that Los Angeles City Council candidates weigh in on what has become a thorny issue: bike lanes. The lanes are part of a multimillion-dollar citywide effort called Vision Zero, initiated by Mayor Eric Garcetti, to build a bike network and reduce traffic fatalities.

Javier Romero has witnessed nearly 60 years worth of change from the window of his TV repair shop on Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima, but the 78-year-old repairman said the new bike lanes that appeared on his street last fall have him worried.

With the Los Angeles Unified school board election less than a week away, the two remaining candidates for the District 6 school board seat made last-minute rounds to meet with voters, stopping Wednesday night in Lake View Terrace to field questions from the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council.

With the City Council election in the northeast San Fernando Valley heating up, allegations are being flung over the stealing of campaign signs — and now a city leader wants an investigation into whether any of the thefts were perpetrated by a member of a graffiti-removal crew contracted by the city.

On Wednesday, the two candidates for the Los Angeles Unified School District board seat representing much of the east San Fernando Valley will field questions and meet with voters at a candidate forum in Lake View Terrace.

A group that has been fighting high-speed train routes through the northeast San Fernando Valley gave top marks Friday to Los Angeles City Council candidate Karo Torossian over his opponent Monica Rodriguez.

Despite demands by the Los Angeles County Democratic Party that he halt his city council bid, former bicycle shop owner Joe Bray-Ali appeared to push on with his campaign Wednesday after admitting to making inflammatory online remarks and committing other indiscretions.

PACOIMA >> They faced off Saturday as the two top candidates vying to represent a forgotten region of the San Fernando Valley left in the lurch by its former Los Angeles councilman. Both Monica Rodriguez and Karo Torossian vowed that, if elected, the northeast Valley would once again get its fair share of city services.

Los Angeles City Council hopeful Joe Bray-Ali vowed Thursday to forge ahead with his bid for a seat representing northeast Los Angeles and MacArthur Park, despite mounting backlash over offensive remarks he made more than a year ago in an online discussion board.

The calls for Los Angeles City Council candidate Joe Bray-Ali to withdraw from the District 1 race continue to grow louder. On Thursday evening, seven of the council’s 15 members issued a joint statement urging Bray-Ali to step aside over his previous online comments insulting African Americans, transgender and obese people.

Los Angeles City Council candidate Joe Bray-Ali came under fire Wednesday for a bevy of comments he made online in which he used a racial slur and disparaged transgender and obese people. Online postings surfaced in which Bray-Ali uses the term “n*****,” comments on videos of black people fighting, shames obese people and criticizes transgender people.

Councilman Gil Cedillo, a political veteran, is fighting to hold onto his northeast Los Angeles district for a second term, but he won’t be able to count on the support of at least one City Council colleague.

LOS ANGELES — Two dozen candidates will be vying in a special election today to fill the 34th Congressional District seat left vacant by former Rep. Xavier Becerra’s move to Sacramento to become the state’s attorney general.

LOS ANGELES >> Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez will likely face Los Angeles Planning Commissioner Robert Lee Ahn in the June 6 runoff in the 34th Congressional District special election. Gomez, D-Eagle Rock, led the 24-candidate field with 8,156 votes, or 28.

FERGUSON, Mo.>> Ferguson’s leadership has changed drastically since the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown put the St. Louis suburb at the center of the debate over the treatment of blacks by the nation’s police forces.

Los Angeles Unified School District board member Monica Ratliff has endorsed Karo Torossian for the vacant city council seat representing a northeast San Fernando Valley district, and urged her supporters to cast their votes for him.

It’s official. L.A. County voters have passed another increase in the sales tax, making it 9.5 percent starting on July 1. On election night, the sales tax increase was barely ahead of the two-thirds vote needed for passage, but then it carried 73 percent of the 283,029 late-absentee and provisional ballots counted later, one-third of the total votes cast.

Voters will have to decide in May who will represent them in two Los Angeles City Council districts, according to the final tally released Monday. Contests for most seats were decided on March 7, including mayor, city attorney, city controller and several City Council spots.

Measure H, the 1/4 cent sales tax increase to pay for programs to assist the homeless in Los Angeles County, has now garnered 69 percent of the vote from the March 7 election, according to updated results released Friday by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office.

Election Day in Los Angeles happened to coincide with National Pancake Day. Parked in a booth at an IHOP on Sunset I anxiously awaited my free short stack of buttermilk pancakes. Every year the International House of Pancakes teams up with the Children’s Miracle Network of Hospitals for a big fundraiser on National Pancake Day.

Monica Ratliff, the third-place finisher in Tuesday’s contest for the City Council District 7 seat in the San Fernando Valley, said Friday she is conceding, further solidifying a May runoff between Monica Rodriguez and Karo Torossian.